Re: [Gnome-print] Re: GnomeFont state of affairs

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris kaplinski com>]

On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Wolfgang Sourdeau wrote:

>     Lauris> Still, at the current stage of development Gnome has chosen to support
>     Lauris> proprietary systems too. Either such support has to be dropped, or
>     Lauris> separate glue libraries have to be written for those, or we need political
>     Lauris> decision that now it is the time of other vendors to emulate GNU, not of
>     Lauris> GNU to try being compatible with others.
> 
> I don't think it will be that much of a problem. Take for example the
> Xview framework from Sun. Gnome is just another framework.
> If vendors want to include Gnome, I don't think it will be such an
> integration problem. It will probably be even simpler since there
> would be less libraries to take care of.

But this exactly IS political decision.
Currently WE take means, to keep Gnome compatible with Solaris and AIX and
IRIX etc - using several glue libraries which hide most system specific
things, so core gnome development does not have much need to look into
portability issues
What you suggest is, that we stop that, and let big vendors to take that
job themselves - updating their libc or maintaining Gnome distributions
for their systems
Take some gnome (gtk, glib, libunicode, whatever...) functionality and add
that to glibc From that point either:
- gnome runs only on glibc (compatible) systems
- we have to create glue code for other libc-s
In the latter case we have not won much, as we still have bunch of small
libraries to maintain. The former case needs political decision.

Lauris